Pretty amazing... (7+ / 0-)This is a comment in a Daily Kos piece celebrating the possibility that France and England may downgrade diplomatic relations with Israel.
141 comments so far, and not a single apologist trying to defend Israel to be found.
The times, they are a changin'.
by RichterScale on Sun Dec 02, 2012 at 09:42:14 PM PST
The commenter is absolutely correct that times are changing.
There are very few Jewish friends of the Jewish state left on Daily Kos and those that still have access to the site tend to be weak.
The truth, of course, is that the grassroots / netroots of the progressive-left and the Democratic party has betrayed the Jewish people which is why we are seeing such little push back. This has been coming on for years.
These progressive idealists honestly think that the Jews are guilty as sin, but this is nothing new, is it? The Nazis were also idealists who thought that we were guilty as sin.
Never heard of that chump before.
ReplyDeleteSee, there's the problem with that site. And, I'd venture to guess, most left blogs if HuffPo, CiF, etc, are any indication.
I spent almost every day for over a year there in I-P, and that user (#50,000-something, means he's been around since about 2005) is yet another scumbag I've never seen or heard of before. And I never knew the one who replied to him was one of them, either. They're hiding literally everywhere at that place, and for anyone to claim that the anti-Israel fanatics at that site are a minority is simply laughable.
I don't know about the 'grassroots,' but the netroots is absolutely packed with these losers.
But at least I can think of it this way - that site essentially traded Howard Dean for... heathlander. So there's that. At least Dem politicians know to avoid that heinous pit.
ReplyDeleteAnd Harry's Place is now back online...
ReplyDeleteUnder the bus, into the sea, whatever it takes, eh?
ReplyDelete(Has France found someone to quickly surrender to yet?)
Although this is in the context of speech and tolerance in higher education, it applies to the environment at DKos. From Greg Lukianoff:
ReplyDeleteIf higher education were living up to its goal of making people deeper, sharper, and better critical thinkers, we could reasonably expect to live in a golden age of discourse. After all, more of our population is college educated than ever before. But I don’t believe anybody thinks that’s the case. By tolerating censorship and by making it risky for students to honestly speak their minds, universities encourage students to play it safe and talk only to those students with whom they already agree — a tendency that can’t help but spill over into the world off campus once those students leave. This means that higher education, an institution that should be opening people’s minds to new ideas and dissenting opinions, may actually be supercharging our political polarization.
One of the most intriguing pieces of data I came across while researching Unlearning Liberty is that there is an inverse relationship between how much education people have and how frequently they talk to those with whom they disagree politically (this research is covered briefly in Diana Muntz’s excellent Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy). In other words, there is evidence that the more schooling you receive, the tighter your echo chamber becomes. A truly educated person, however, should develop the intellectual habit of actively seeking out challenging debates rather than settling into a self-affirming clique.
http://www.volokh.com/2012/10/29/free-speech-on-campus-unlearning-liberty/
In other words, the "smart" folks living in the "reality based" community at DKos are some of the least tolerant and least exposed to ideas outside the echo chamber, while believing just the opposite about themselves.
You nail it oldschool. It's one reason so many of us find ourselves outliers at that awful site.
DeleteJeremy Ben-Ami, of J Street infamy, has written a piece entitled Let Obama Lead the Way.
ReplyDeleteIn the comments we read this:
14. Our fate is in our own hands
As long as we wait for anybody else to "lead the way" we are lost. It is Jews inside and outside of Israel who have to prove their right to exist. It is time we correct the separation that happened over 2 thousand years ago and again become a single, united Nation based on mutual guarantee. Only such a force can remove any doubts and create a positive image about Jews and Israel. Then we can again become examples and leaders for a broken world instead of scapegoats doubting ourselves.
Zsolt, Wanganui,NZ (12.03.12)
I don't entirely agree with this comment because I do not think that we are under any obligation to prove anything to anyone, but I definitely agree that there needs to be solidarity between the Jews of Israel and those of us in the diaspora, but there isn't.
One thing that the recent re-election of Barack Obama showed is that there is a big disconnect between the way that Israeli Jews understand their circumstances versus the way that diaspora Jews (or, at least, American Jews) understand the circumstances of Israeli Jews.
Many diaspora Jews, particularly progressive-left diaspora Jews, blame our counterparts in Israel, mainly our "conservative" counterparts in Israel, for the fact that there is no peace agreement.
So who are we to think knows best? The Jews in Haifa, Israel, or the Jews in Walnut Creek, California?
I'll go with the Jews in Haifa, thank you very much.
Mike, that solidarity is unlikely ever given the partisan nature of the debate. There are of course other factors such as religiosity etc but the the big divide is partisan IMO.
ReplyDeleteExactly, Mike. When you listen to their words, the derangement against Bibi and the "right," has pretty much replaced all other complaints. The left in Israel is pretty much dead and it drives them crazy. How can this be they wonder?
DeleteWhich kinda begs the realistic question "what about when the left controlled the politics?" Chirp chirp chirp chirp, derpa derpa.
ReplyDeleteI might add that there are SOME on the left who understand why this has happened (ie terrorism has driven Israel right etc) they can't abide that fact and are still caught up in dead concepts and paradigms. They can't move on; won't move on.
ReplyDeleteThe thing of it is is that many of us, such as myself, actually come out of the left.
DeleteIt seems to me that we very much need liberal Jewish critics of the left, including the Jewish left.
Some on the Jewish left castigate me as a right-winger, but the fact of the matter is that we, at Israel Thrives, are far more consistently liberal than are our progressive critics.
The reason for that is because, unlike Barack Obama, we stand up for the civil liberties of women, and Gay people, and non-Muslims, and, of course, Jews in the Muslim Middle East.
Either one believes in universal human rights or one does not. But you cannot support the vicious theocratic movements in the Muslim Middle East via the misnamed "Arab Spring" and still claim to support liberalism.
It's a contradiction in terms.
And, the fact of the matter is that even "right wing," Israel is farther to the left than any of Israel's neighbors and enemies.
DeleteThere used to be an Old Left revivalist movement called the Euston Manifesto a few years back, centered on criticizing the straying of the Left from its classical liberal roots. The Eustonians sounded pretty much like the staff of this blog.
DeleteUnfortunately, the Euston Manifesto movement died with a whimper, out of a general loss of interest. I can't be sure, but I'd wager the movement folded due to the twin factors of classical liberals defecting to the American center-right and a veering to the neo-Marxist Left by those who valued the label of "Left" more than they valued classical liberalism.